


Lady of the Thames

by Chyme



Series: Time waits for no Husband, Child, or Pawn [2]
Category: Ben 10 Series
Genre: Excalibur, Female Friendship, Gen, Moving On, Possible Character Study, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-09 00:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16439822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chyme/pseuds/Chyme
Summary: It's just another day in the life of Kai Green. Or is it?





	Lady of the Thames

 

Kai knew how the pattern went. Find an ancient site that was just a little more dangerous that her usual haunts. Get accosted by her Grandfather's voice on the phone, pestering her to ask Ben along. End up waiting for two hours, in the dust and sun, waiting for the shadow of Rook's ship to dance above her head and alight on the ground.

And then put up with the torture of his whining voice, rather than the more impressive growl of some of his alien ones, maybe get involved with a bitter stare contest as they tromp their way over death traps and other lovely little surprises. Save each other and refuse to say thank you afterwards. And all the while ignoring the embarrassment she felt as Rook looked at them with what Ben labelled his 'judegy eyes.'

'That is not a proper word, Ben,' he said stiffly, a rather snooty touch to his voice.

Kai saw Ben stiffen beside her. And had to admit that it had got her hackles up too. She was sure he didn't mean to, being an alien and all, but honestly Rook's tone sometimes reminded her of the oh-so-cultured white historians she ran into every now and again, and the ah, lectures they sometimes gave her. Not all of them were bad per say, but sometimes, just the way they spoke to her, the reedy sound of their I-know-better-than-you tone made her want to scream. Rook's was a little better if only because she was reasonably confident that there was no subconscious racism lurking beneath there. Sexism perhaps? She didn't really know him well enough to say. Besides, that tone was just as often used on Ben as it was on her.

So Kai decided to ignore it. At least it brought her enough time to clamber inside the temple first.

No one was going to distract her from her work, not even Ben Tennyson!

 

\--------------------------

 

Five minutes later and the space her fingers encountered between the bricks in front of her looked deceptively dark, like lines of ink stretching out into ridges and grids that hands, now centuries dead, had slotted stone blocks into very carefully. Kai swung a torch out closer to one of these bricks, registering the scuttling of a small brown thing as it pressed itself deeper inside the crack; a small lizard or spider perhaps. She had half a mind to reach out and put it down the back of Ben's shirt. Instead she opened her mouth. Perhaps giving him a history lesson would make him easier to deal with.

'You know, I've always wondered if some of the Thep Khufan's culture originated from Earth; or whether some of Ancient Egypt's practises, especially the way they handled their dead, were a direct result of coming into contact with them.' She raised her hands, grip tightening on the torch in her excitement, having no clue that to Ben, in this moment, she resembled Rook indulging himself in a lecture. 'We have evidence in hieroglyph records that a few Galvan's meddled with the building of some of the pyramids after all; so who's to say the Thep Khufan didn't crash on Earth at one point?'

'Wow, aliens interfering with ancient Earth civilisations. Will wonders never cease.'

Her hackles rose as she heard the boredom in Ben's voice.

'C'mon Kai, that's like every crackpot theory on the internet; humans couldn't possibly build stone huts or something because they were sooo dumb. So obviously aliens did it.'

Kai didn't bother to bite out a smart remark. Instead she gingerly reached out with her fingers, glad for once, that today she had kept her hands constricted within the taunt squeeze of her leather gloves. She tuned both Rook and Ben out as she gripped hold of the small scuttling thing.

'Crackpot?' the taller alien was saying, his voice a distant blur in the background. 'Yes, I have heard this phrase. A reference to someone who believes in an unsustainable theory, or perhaps is just plain 'plum loco', as you would say.'

Kai turned round to see Ben open his mouth, probably, she thought, to bark out some sort of insult to her general intelligence and almost casually, chucked the struggling spider into his mouth. And then leant back against the nearest wall, arms crossed to watch the eschewing fireworks.

He didn't fail to disappoint. Ben sputtered, leaning over and drawing his fingers into his mouth as though he could magically dredge up the spider from the back of the throat. Unlikely, Kai thought. She had good aim, after all. Her Grandfather used to teach her to play darts at the local taverns and pubs they crawled through during their more dust-filled adventures. She had grown up with the red and black of the felt-lined board emblazoned across her mind, learning to keep the pulse in her fingers steady round the knife her Grandfather had eventually taught her to hold. Throwing spiders wasn't that much different; you just had to take their lighter weight into account and adjust the force of your throw correspondingly.

Ben was by now making dramatic choking noises as though he were actually dying, the big baby, and Rook looked worried enough to bend over him like some giant mother hen, all to give the centre of his back a calculated thump.

Kai rolled her eyes. 'Don't indulge him!' she told the Revonnahgander crossly; how Ben didn't wind up insulting and estranging him for life she had no idea. From what she had read, Revonnahganders were from a close-knit and slightly isolated culture, regarding anything that deviated into rudeness as highly taboo.

Rook gave her prying look. 'What exactly did you force-feed him?'

Kai bristled at the suspicision in his tone. 'Nothing venomous! Geeze!'

'Yeah...sure...' Ben wheezed, now unbending from the huddled shape he'd thrown himself into. 'What kinda guy doesn't like eating spiders.' He gave a shudder. 'Ew, grooosss. I can still feel its legs tickling the back of my throat.'

'You are just imagining it,' Rook said firmly. But the fingers trailing soothingly over Ben's back told Kai that a much gentler emotion was stirring him to speak. 'And by now it will be firmly on its way to being digested.'

Ben looked at him bleakly. 'How are you so bad at cheering people up?'

Rook frowned and patted him on the head, but Ben shook him off.

'Seriously,' he demanded, eyes fixed on Kai, 'what is your deal! What kind of crazy person throws spiders into someone's mouth!'

Rook blinked. 'You are not calling her plum loco?' he inquired, sounding honestly curious.

But both Kai and Ben ignored him, hunching over and wrinkling their brows so that they could glare at each other all the more furiously.

'Think of it as me teaching you to branch out your general diet,' Kai said stonily. 'I've seen the junk you eat. You could learn to handle a little variety.'

'Variety, _yes_ ,' Ben said through gritted teeth. 'Spiders _? No!_ I bet you didn't even bother to check whether it was venomous to humans or not!'

'Believe me,' Kai muttered, 'I'm beginning to wish I hadn't.'

She turned and stomped off into the gloom, head held high.

Ben blinked. 'Hey! Get back here!'

But Kai wasn't listening. She had spent hours studying the way this temple curved through the undergrowth of sand outside, drawing up imaginary blueprints and planning on how best to enter the structure. She had caved to her Grandfather's insistence she call Ben, but like always he was spoiling everything by being himself.

She blew out a frustrated breath and was about to take another step –

'Kai, no!'

Something brushed by her, a sweep of air ruffling her clothes and then her cheek flooded with red. She could hear small snitches of air as more knives were released and she barely had time to tense, to duck and roll, before she was already on the ground, the smell and warmth of Ben against her back. Her torch clattered away into the darkness, its light falling away into oblivion and she was left with the sound of Ben simply breathing overhead, his shirt pressed to hers so tightly that she was sure, on each exhalation of his chest, that he would be able to feel the imprint of her bra strap against his muscles. All things considered though, it wasn't too bad; the smell of his aftershave dipped into the slightly sour rush of lemon freshness, which she felt rather fitting, given his general disposition, and while he was skinny, he was still strong enough to shove her down without any real problem.

She heard the blast and clang of Rook's Proto-tool overhead as he deflected some of the whizzing metal projectiles and then Ben growled. The next second there was a familiar flash of light and Terraspin was hovering over her, a few dull thuds resulting as the knives bounced off his shell.

'This has gone on long enough,' he said and then he streaked forward, head low to the ground as his limbs turned like a fan, successfully cutting deep groves into either side of the ancient corridor that was a little too small to hold the width of his shape.

Kai let out an outraged cry. 'Couldn't you have turned into something smaller?! You're destroying my temple!'

' _Your_ temple?' she heard him mutter and then there was a clang and a crash as the wall shooting knives out of the darkness crumbled into dust.

Rook sighed and slotted his Proto-tool onto his shoulder, finger flicking against its side so that a sharp beam of light was thrown out in front of them.

'It seems that this booby-trapped wall was built in front of a secret passage,' he noted.

'No,' Kai breathed, before she sprinted through the rolling dust and leapt over the rubble of broken masonry. She ignored Ben's yell at her to be careful and broke into a small, bricked-laden room, a long panel of undivided stone stretching from one side to the other at the very end like the horizontal streak of a framed picture. On it was, quite obviously, a set of hieroglyphs, bunched up into columns of writing. But in the very centre were murals, etchings of angled limbs and streaked capes poking out of a wreathing of dust and age.

Peering closer and brushing tentative fingers over the bumps the artisans had raised and carved out, Kai could see that the capes were just a bulky depiction of bandages hanging loose and free from the figures. And the lines carefully drawn across arms and legs made it seem as though the limbs had been striped, or else covered with bandages.

'Thep Khufan,' she whispered, noting the headdress and the way the faces lacked human mouths. 'Finally. _Proof_.'

She spun round, straight into Ben's now human arms.

'Oh, Ben! This is wonderful!'

And in her elation, she pressed her mouth against his. Or at least tried to. Because suddenly there was a quick rush of air drawing against her face, not from a knife this time, but a hand. And instead of softness, her lips found the hard nubs of fingertips pushing back against her approach.

She drew back surprised. And strangely, a little hurt.

'Why's your hand across your mouth?' she asked, feeling her eyebrow raise. 'You don't think I'm gonna throw another spider inside it, do you?'

Ben shook his head frantically and then, as though he were expecting her to fly out and hit him, he cautiously dragged his fingers from his mouth.

'No! I just...I thought you were gonna kiss me...'

'Well, not now, I'm not!' Kai said, rather stiffly. She turned back to inspect the picture once more; but something in the budding silence annoyed her, disrupting her concentration.

She had expected...what had she expected? A rant, an insult? No, she thought sullenly. Since towards the end of their stint in Dos Santos together, Ben had actually been nice. Or, at least nicer. He had actually thanked her in that ridiculous space gameshow and given her help without expecting anything in return. And she was pretty damn sure he had enjoyed their kisses together.

She spun round, squinting slightly as the full glare of Rook's Proto-tool beamed directly into her eyes.

'What's your problem?' she demanded, her eyes finding Ben's nervous-looking face again. 'What, are you gonna say my breath stinks or something? Because your mouth doesn't exactly smell like a picnic either.'

Ben stared at her, slightly wide-eyed as the shadows curved around the ends of his face, sloping off into the hollows of his neck. It made him look strange, alien to her, like he was a wide-eyed owl peering in from the gloom, inspecting her and finding her lacking somehow.

So she waved her hand in front of his face. 'Heeelloo?'

And Ben immediately glanced away, his eyes flickering to Rook. 'I...' he swallowed, then turned back to Kai, his face smoothing over into that serious look he got sometimes, the one that said he knew people would die if he didn't do something to stop it. 'I can't. _We_ can't. Kiss, I mean. Not anymore.'

Kai blinked.

'It's not that you're _bad_ or anything-'

Kai turned round in a huff, arms slotting into an easy cross over her chest.

'Wait, wait, _wait,_ just listen, okay?'

He grabbed hold of her shoulder and turned her round to face him. 'It's just, I'm with someone now. So kissing you, it's kinda off the menu.'

Rook snorted quietly from the corner.

Kai blinked. 'That didn't seem to stop you when you were dating Ester,' she remarked blithely.

Ben's brow furrowed and he squeezed her shoulders. 'You were the one who first kissed me!'

'So you are both as bad as each other, then,' Rook muttered.

Ben's eyes tore themselves away from Kai and she was left, feeling bereft and slightly lonely, as his hand dropped from her shoulder.

'Are you mad?' he asked Rook anxiously. 'Please don't be mad, I just...I don't want to be mean to her. That's not a bad thing, right?'

Rook tilted his head to one side and Kai noticed, with a start, that his arms were as firmly crossed over one another as hers had been moments before. 'No,' he answered. 'It is not. So long as you are not embarrassed to state who you are now in a relationship with.'

Ben rolled his eyes. 'I was getting to that, jeez,' he muttered, aggrieved. Then he looked at Kai and with a small, unsure smile, said, 'Don't freak out, okay?' Then he jerked his head over to a sulky-looking Rook. 'That's my boyfriend, over there. Mr Pouty.'

'I am not pouting.'

'Dude, you totally are.'

Kai promptly freaked out.

Okay, so she didn't go 'plum loco' or anything. She simply felt her jaw drop open and a second later, an embarrassingly loud 'WHAT' dropped out. It rolled away, out from her lips and for a moment, she regretted it, but then she remembered that she was Kai Green and he was the same old Ben, arrogant, obnoxious and in no way-

'G-gay?' she stuttered, pointing between the two of them as though jabbing the air could make her feel in any way better. 'You two are? Gay?' Then she remembered how happy Ben had looked that time after their lips had collided together on the pavement and immediately felt foolish. 'I mean, bi? You are?' she asked, now pointing at Ben. God, she was as lame as he was.

Rook stiffened and looked slightly offended. 'What about me? Why am I am not giving the benefit of doubt and labelled 'bi?'

Great, now she was even managing to offend the alien. She was actually turning into the _Ben_ of the group.

'Easy, Rook,' Ben whispered urgently. 'Girls are scary when they're having a meltdown.'

Kai stomped her foot. 'I am not having a meltdown!'

Then she turned her attention back to the mural, her eyes stinging with something that couldn't possibly be tears, no way. She didn't sob, didn't shake and her fingers, when they reached up to touch the engraving again, were as calm and firm as ever. And yet something inside her quivered and shook. And if there was a slightly watery sheen to her cheeks, when she eventually turned round to declare themselves done, neither boy was unkind enough to mention it.

 

\--------------------------

 

Why did the news disturb her so? Kai mused on this hours after the Proto-truck had left her behind. She _knew_ she wasn't homophobic. She had shared a tent with a gay girl just a few months ago on an exhibition dig, no problem, and she had always found herself snorting over how historians used to rush over themselves to de-gayify various epitaphs and records where a less than straight interpretation of the people mentioned was the most logical course of action to take. And well, it wasn't like she hadn't read a few gay romance novels in her time, some seedier than others...

Kai shook herself. She was now on a plane, her legs locked into the small dark space in front of her as the blue felt of the seat rubbed against her thighs. To her side, a middle-aged man was snoring, the wine glass rumbling slightly on the tray he had yanked out in front of him fifteen minutes ago. Kai gave him a look of disgust, her eyes flickering to the 'seatbelt' light that had switched on, round about the same turbulence had started shaking the plane.

Because why should she have to clear away his mess? God, Ben would probably grow up to be just like him, inconveniencing everyone around within spitting distance...

Kai bit her lip. Why? Why was she so fixated on Ben? She didn't even like hi- well, okay, he was kinda cute and he could change into cute creatures and on better days, she could appreciate his sense of humour. But that was it!

God, Ester was _stupid_ , to have broken up for him just because she and Ben _sometimes_ got on well.

 

\--------------------------

 

'I am not stupid!' Ester said indignantly half an hour later.

Kai smiled indulgently, her eyes crinkling slightly as she adjusted the canvas bag over her shoulder . 'Yeah,' she said fondly, 'you kinda were.'

Ester blew a raspberry down at her through the phone and Kai laughed. At times like this, she could understand why Ben and Ester had been drawn together.

'Look,' she said, 'this isn't so much a casual call, as it is a...well, a...'

Ester waited patiently, but as Kai's words dried up in her threat, she let a long sigh slide down over the phone-line.

'You know, it isn't that difficult to ask for help. The world won't end if you do. All you have to do is open your mouth and say 'hey Ester? Want to hang out?'

Kai huffed in frustration. 'Yeah, but you have responsibilities! I can't just ask you to pop over to London just to see me! What do you think I am, Ben?'

'Oh good,' said Ester dully. 'I'm here to hear you rant about Ben.'

Kai reined herself in. 'No, that's not what I meant! Look I, okay this is gonna sound weird but did you know...that he and Rook...are dating?'

There was a long silence. Then:

'I,' said Ester. Then she stopped. 'I.'

Kai listened to her breathe. It sounded scratchy, like a rattle somehow, not full of static, but as though she were fighting down a cough. And then the noise gradually churned out into a tickle of noise, a peal of laughter spreading in its wake.

'Hahaha! That's classic! And oooh, that explains so much! I always chalked it up to Rook being a snobby by-the-book Plumber, but oh, this puts those glares he was giving me when we first met and I was playing around with Ben into a whole new context! Or maybe not, but it's sure fun to re-imagine it that way!'

Kai clutched the strap of her bag tighter and fought very hard to keep herself from snapping.

'You aren't upset?'

'No, why would I be- _oh_.' Ester was silent for a moment and then she said, very gently, 'but you are?'

Kai shrugged, all too aware that Ester couldn't see her do so and scuffed her boot against the dull grey floor. The clomping sounds of other shoes passed by her, and for a moment the squeaks from the nearest wheeled-on suitcase slammed against the rhythm they produced to rise up into a shrill scream.

'No,' said Kai, as soon as she could breathe, the suitcase, alligator-green, passing through the glass doorway ahead. 'I mean...I don't know?'

'I'm sure fate will work itself out,' Ester said sympathetically. 'I mean this thing with Rook? It might just be a fad. It's natural to experiment while we're still young, right? Maybe it's some weird battlefield camaraderie that's gone sexual in a friends-with-benefits scheme?'

Kai wrinkled her nose. 'You're working awfully hard to justify this. Why does it matter so much to you?'

'Because I didn't see it coming,' Ester remarked blithely. 'And it annoys me that I hung out with them and didn't pick up on it. Not in the same way that I picked up on you and Ben being hopelessly attracted to each other.'

'That wasn't- I'm not- ARGH!'

This last word came out as a bellow and Kai flinched as few people turned to look at her queerly.

'Look,' said Ester in her I'm-being-reasonable tone of voice. 'The Kraaho aren't going to die without me for a few days. So why don't we meet up?'

 

\--------------------------

 

So Kai found herself hanging around in London. Literally hanging around.

'Urgh,' she muttered a few hours later, the word slipping out into a groan as the muscles in her arms protested. 'Ester? Could you hurry up and give me a hand?'

Ester slipped beneath the belly of a thrashing Thep Khufan and thrust herself into the space between his legs, yanking at the bandages trailing from his feet. The force sent him forwards, swiftly clunking his Egyptian-themed headpiece against the railings. 'Hold on!'

'I am,' Kai muttered grimly. She could feel the sweat from her fingers rubbing against the metal they were desperately wrapped round.

Ester dove between the railings above, her body like a swift current as she stretched and swam round the metal bars in a complex pattern, the Thep Kufan imitating her and becoming nothing more than lines of parchment yellow as he threaded himself in after her. Ester then let out a breathless laugh and her foot swiftly soared out, multiple metres away from the rest of her body, to casually kick his head away from the rest of him. Kai caught a glimpse of his wide purple eyes, stuck on a black headpiece surrounded by gold and blue stripes, before he fell away into the gloom below her.

'Okay,' said Ester, pulling herself back into a somewhat normal shape. 'Heave ho!'

And then her arms raced down to grab Kai, weaving their way around her like a harness, before yanking her up.

'You know that's the second time I had to be saved from plummeting to the bottom of Big Ben,' Kai remarked blithely, as soon as she could stare out into the sky and not see the luminous face of the giant clock in front of her. 'It's actually getting a little old.'

Ester looked at her curiously but refrained from asking who it was exactly, that had saved her last time. Kai appreciated it.

'Sooo,' she said. Yeah. I wasn't expecting to be attacked by a Mummy from outer space. But I'm glad you were here, anyway.'

Ester shrugged. 'Comes with the territory.'

Kai frowned. 'No it doesn't. Not usually. My adventures tend to be quite boring compared to Ben's.'

'Yeah, well, Ben does have the handy magnet of the Omnitrix stuck to his arm. Trouble's always gonna find him. I'm half-way convinced that there's a heap of bad karma attached to it, or something.'

'I think it's Ben who's racked up the bad karma, personally,' Kai said dryly.

Ester laughed to herself. 'Even when he's not here, you're ragging on him.'

Kai snorted. 'I don't care if that Thep Khufan came after me because I 'violated the sanctity of history that should not be disturbed.' I'm ninety percent sure that if Ben hadn't been there at the temple, that mummy would have left me alone.'

Ester raised an eyebrow. 'Oooookay. Maybe we should leave the topic of 'Ben' alone for a while.'

Kai huffed and turns away, directing her gaze to the Thames and the churn of its current. Limpid gold lights choked and spun along the dark weave of its waters, molten reflections that barely struck a spark against the dark of the night.

And yet, all she could see in her mind's eye was Ben, being stupid, being funny, and attempting to be nice. And she could remember dropping him on the floor of the temple at Dos Santos, the cold slap of sound as his elbow hit the ground, and then in contrast the warm thud of him against her as her shoulders met the pavement and his lips pushed into hers, all thanks to the untimely position of a banana skin. She...

'I hate this,' she said finally. 'It's stupid. I feel like I've lost something before it ever began.'

And it's not as though she's unfamiliar with the feeling either. Some artefacts have broken beneath her hands before her fingers even had time to really explore them, some have crumbled like the wet base of a biscuit before she had the time to feel a sense of accomplishment at having found them. And she's cried, heavily, over broken vases and smashed epithets,the ruins of them too small to have made a significant impact on history. And yet to someone, long since dead, they probably once meant the world.

'Be careful,' her grandfather had told when she was young, when he brought her brushes for her birthday, their hair flecked with dust and showed her how to hover them over the bones of dead birds and twist sand and dirt out of their cracks. 'You're touching the history of our planet. Maybe others too. But once it was an everyday sight to people. You mustn't forget that.'

Kai hadn't. But Ben had never been...never was an everyday sight. It shouldn't have hurt to lose him like this.

'Maybe it's fate,' Ester said wistfully. 'And it doesn't like being broken. Or the timeline Spanner came from is trying to fix itself and it's like...pulling at you. Screaming at you to pay attention. Maybe that's why it hurts.'

Kai shook her head. 'I don't believe in that,' she said firmly. 'I will _never_ believe in something like that.'

Then she blinked. And squinted. 'What's that?' she asked, raising her hand point at something that rose and broke through the water below. It was tiny, slim and brown, like the crook of a large branch that had fallen and disrupted the waves, cutting the current in half. And above, shimmering, in a long flame of grim, grey light was...a cross. A Christian-like cross. Or else a bit of foil or something that couldn't help catching the flare of a white streetlamp perched on the shore.

'Even if we run, we won't make it before it passes under that bridge,' Ester pointed out. Then she turned and Kai felt a chill as a sharp smirk cut that pink face in half. 'Or well, you won't. But my legs? They have a longer stride than yours.'

Kai smirked and swung her arms around Ester's neck. Already, the chill had abated, turning into the transformative power of adrenalin. 'Alright Tarzan. I'll be Jane.'

Ester did let out a more genuine laugh at that and then Kai felt the world fall away, her stomach dropping, racing away into the space she and Ester left behind as the girl stepped out, off into the yawning space of the streets below. Her legs stretched and fell, and there was a thud that shook up them, that rang into the hollow glide of Kai's spine and filled her now empty stomach as the world spun to halt. Ester's feet, yards and metres away beneath them both, picked out grooves and pockmarks against the sides of houses, balancing on gutter spouts and sloping tiles, pushing into the corners of rising flats as they leapt over countless metres, forming the most balanced blend of stilts Kai had ever found herself on. The distance between them and the ground below shorted with every step, Ester seemingly using each jarring motion as an opportunity to pull her muscles closer together, back into their usual proportions.

Kai glanced behind them both, just in time to see the golden glow of Big Ben's clock face became a disc, a shining moon-sized patch that looked as though she could reach out and put it in her pocket like a coin.

'I seem to be traveling in style these days,' she remarked, thinking of the various rides she had gotten from Ben's alien forms or his weird time-traveling motorcycle.

'Easy for the person not exerting any effort to say,' huffed Ester.

Kai tightened her arms round Ester's neck, the warm brush of the other girl's coat sweeping against her chest. Her arms were like steel bands, still wrapped around her middle firmly.

She wasn't sure what to say in reply. Certainly not a 'sorry.'

And then the Thames broke into their sight with a clear, heavy black.

'Oh,' Kai breathed.

She could see more clearly now. And what might have been a branch earlier, was now an arm soaring above the blue of waves it cut through, scattering them into heedless ripples. And what arched out from the knotted fingers was a hilt, not a cross, of a sword. And while Kai had never seen the blade, because it had been choked off by a stone the last time she had seen it, the hilt still pulled at her memory.

'You have got to be kidding me,' she muttered. She half-fell, half-ran from Ester's arms as they uncoiled themselves from around her and deposited her on the street. All she could see was that glimmering, partially mud-caked sword.

The arm drifted closer to the shore, intent and purposeful, and behind her Kai heard Ester mutter, 'kinda beefy for a lady of the lake,' but she didn't care, she was already hooking her arm to the pavement, legs balancing and pushing off its edge as her other hand fumbled out above the water.

The brown hand in front of her came close enough to finally push its knuckles into her palm like a brusque kiss and Kai barely spared a glance at the heavy set of muscles that ran down and bunched together to join it. But she did remember, before it slipped back beneath the waves, to press out a quick 'thank you.'

She rolled back onto the pavement and met Ester's eyes.

'So?' asked the other girl, with a playful arch of her eyebrows. 'Does this make you the Once and Future Queen?'

'You've been reading too much T.H. White,' Kai said dryly, relishing in the fact that she was with someone who would actually get the reference. Well, Rook probably would have but she wasn't really sure how to feel about him anymore. 'And...well. I wouldn't object to be called 'Your Majesty.'

'You'd actually need subjects for that,' Ester said primly.

Kai grinned. 'What? Like you have?'

Ester scowled. But Kai, too busy admiring the sheen of the sword and how right it felt tucked between her fingers, was too preoccupied to care.

 

\--------------------------

 

'So,' said Ben later, his voice decidedly skeptical. 'An arm that you didn't see the owner of, just happened to pop up and give you a legendary sword. A sword that, last time I checked, was firmly wedged in a stone even _I_ couldn't heft and was, until now, trapped under miles of water.'

Kai beamed, even though he couldn't see her and pressed the phone more firmly against her cheek. 'Yep.'

Ben groaned. 'C'mon! Aren't you the littlest bit suspicious? Why would a disembodied arm give you the sword?'

'I don't know, Ben, why would the Omnitrix happen to land near your campsite when you were ten?' Kai asked completely deadpan.

'Because Azumuth was trying to send it to my Grandpa,' he pointed out, a hint of annoyance ringing beneath his tone. 'He just wasn't as good at setting coordinates as he thought he was.'

'Well, yeah, he probably didn't want to squash you flat.' Kai stopped and sighed. This impulse to call Ben, to shove this new thing of hers in his face was stupid. She just wanted...she wasn't sure what she wanted.

'You suck,' she decided on saying. 'I mean you're a pain and I guess you don't owe me anything...but still, a heads up would've been nice! I mean, we'd kissed, however unintentional or accidental it was, before, like, twice, so you knew there was a chance of it happening again-'

'What are yo-'

'So you could have warned me about you dating someone-'

'No.'

Rook's voice rang out, loud and stubborn and slightly cool, for all the firmness he projected the word with.

Kai frowns. 'Did you put me on loud-speaker?'

'I don't-' Ben stopped and breathed, somewhat shakily. Kai could just picture him running a hand around the back of his neck awkwardly. 'I don't know how to deal with you anymore.'

'So you're ganging up on me!'

'No,' said Rook again, sounding far more patient than Kai suspected he actually felt. 'Everyone, you included Miss Green, is tired. Do you not think we should stop?'

There was a weight to his words, a whole host of unasked questions rushing beneath the surface. Kai paused, her eyes stuck on the motel window. The sky outside was grey, the buildings sinking behind layers of grey mist that spiralled out like some sort of rolling emission from a dragon's breath. Something that Ben had probably met before. Not her, though.

'Stop?' she echoed. 'We've barely began. I've hardly done anything.'

'Then you should stop before you do,' Rook said, his tone still barely neutral before it was cut off with a loud beep. Kai's mouth fell open. Even Ben had never hung up on her!

She paused and let the phone drop away from her cheek onto the bed. The duvet was a dull silver, meant to be soothing but right now looked as dreary and forbidding as the mist outside.

Rook, it seemed, was enforcing boundaries. Probably because Ben was too wimpy to do it himself.

There was a knock on the door.

'I've found this neat Chinese place,' said Ester, her voice carrying through the door. 'You wanna come.'

Kai considered dragging her sword with her for one hot minute. But no. She wasn't Ben. She wasn't stupid.

'Coming!' she said.

 

\--------------------------

 

The Chinese place was full of bright red tones, lanterns that look as though they'd made more of paper than plastics, swinging in the breeze. The grey mist outside enfolded everything beyond the window pane with its customary wetness, rolling like a blanket across cars and houses and cutting most things off from view.

Ester stuffed some crispy chicken in her mouth, then gulped down a breaded ball of pork. 'Mmmm.'

Kai eyed her. 'I'm kinda jealous that your jaws can stretch that far.'

Ester swallowed then pointed a finger at herself. 'Hybrid,' she stated as though this explained everything. 'Best of both worlds. We tend to pick up more pros than cons in our general biology.'

Kai went very quiet for a moment as she recalled her Grandfather talking about how even though he didn't have anything against interspecies relationships, no, of course not, not a polished Plumber like him, he still thought it was selfish for the people involved. 'Because the children born are, eight times out of ten, sterile,' he told her grimly, dark eyes steady with conviction. 'It's unfair to give birth to a child when you know there's a good chance that they'll never be able to have that joy for themselves.'

Kai had never argued back, or at least if she had, it was half-hearted thing, perhaps because her Grandfather had always seemed a bit god-like to her, rarely if ever wrong. But glancing at Ester now, her cheeks fairly bulging with a water chestnut and some spring onions, she wondered what he would say about this girl's existence. Would he say her parents had been selfish for even trying to create her?

At least, she consoled herself, Ben and Rook would never face that problem.

'Where are your parents?' she found herself asking.

Something in Ester's expression clouded over. 'Gone. Both of them. My mum died when I was little, of over-exposure. Would it surprise you to know that the environment my Dad needed to survive in wasn't really good for humans, at least not in the long-term?' She laughed and looked away for a moment. 'And Dad? Well.' She shrugged. 'Heart-attack. He ran himself ragged looking after my people.'

Kai's eyes dropped. 'I'm sorry.'

Ester shrugged again as though to say nothing really earth-shattering had ever happened to her and asked, 'what about yours?'

Kai tapped a finger against the table, the bright wood letting out a subtle click.

'They don't care what I do. Not really. They don't get it, the work me and Grandpa do. I'm not even sure they know how dangerous it is at times. They love me, but they've never really bothered to get to know me, either.'

Ester raised a bowl to her lips and sipped at some sweetcorn soup, her eyes never leaving Kai's face. 'Bummer.'

She didn't sound sarcastic as she said it but still Kai felt something in her shrivel a little. And yet, it wasn't enough for her to choke out another apology. Besides, maybe she was projecting. Maybe Ester didn't mean it that way at all.

'Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.'

 

\--------------------------

 

Kai tried to sleep in a rickety bed that night, the posts wooden and cheap. The pillow rode down beneath her back from where it had escaped from behind her head as she thrashed awake from a dream and she breathed. No, gasped. She waited for the terror to crawl away and die. And then up and out she slid, from sheets too thin to hold her.

Around the hilt of the sword, her right hand clutched and up she got.

Down, down, the stairs she went, out, out, through the door she stepped through into the black of night. Her thoughts took up a disjointed rhyme and out, out she walked, towards the neigh of horses and the prancing green of their flickering flames that were their manes, dancing with a clean over the coil of their white, reptilian necks. Men rode them, harps in their hand, and ladies frolicked beside them, laughing, their skirts arranged artfully over the side of their silken saddles. All of the faces that stared down at her, at Kai, were pointed and sharp, eyes yellow as an owls. Inhuman.

Kai swallowed.

'You're not getting this back,' she said steadily.

Laughter came from all around her, and as one, all the mouths moved, their voices speaking in unison.

' _Amuse us and we'll let you keep it_.'

Seconds later, Kai found herself in a glade, a glen, water streaming round an isle of green. A white castle rode up from a hill to her right, and the forest circled into her view like machinery, leaves rustling though there was no hint of a breeze to stir them.

But there was stirring around her, the mill of small people shadowing her shaky steps before they rose up before her startled eyes and flung themselves through the air. Their wings pulsed against her skin, leaving behind thin, whip-like marks, as though dozens of small branches were being pulled back and flung into her face, cutting her cheeks and the bare skin of her legs as they danced around her, their sharp nails daring to push into her neck like the teeth of tiny vampires.

 _'You are so far from Arthur's bloodline,'_ they whispered. ' _But there's still something in you that's shiny, just like him! So if it's not too much trouble, would you give us your soul?'_

Kai growled, and spun, jerking her sword with her clumsily.

'I presume this is Avalon?' she gasped, blood dripping from her bared fingers. 'Don't you have sleeping souls here already to pick on?'

 _'Oh yes_ ,' said the voices in a rush, in a stream of noise that bubbled and sung like the thrashing of sound a brook makes over stones and between boulders _. 'But they have not dared to leave a hand on Excalibur in oh, so many years…you have. That makes you fair game. If you don't want to give up your soul, then learn to wield it.'_

And that is how the time passed. With jabs of pain and Kai learning not to be clumsy with her strikes. Eventually a larger creatures, brown-skinned and sour-faced, took her aside and instructed her to cut an ever-growing sapling into eight diagonally sliced pieces, as though she were chopping a spring onion up for dinner. And it refused to let her leave until the wooden chips scattered at her feet numbered the thousands. And then again and again and again.

Eventually Kai lost sight of the hours, if they even existed here. But if they did, then days later, someone with a newt's legs and scales running over her shoulders above her thickly muscled arms, crawled through the mud to her side.

 _'You may call me Nimue,'_ she whispered. _'I thought I chose well when I gave you that dinky thing Arthur loved too much. Amuse me, lady from across the sea. Amuse me and let's see you bite.'_

Oh, Kai would do more than that. Judo wasn't really suited for waving around an ancient British sword but it gave added oomph to her swings, allowed her legs to step in when an untrained girl with no fancy moves to her resume might have stepped back and cowered away. And if the sword rested a little better inside her hands, if it felt less cumbersome because of the way they had forced her to swing and cut with it before, well. Kai wasn't going to admit to it anytime soon.

She barely even manage to rake it's edge against the fine line of Nimue's glittering scales though, _before the other woman slapped her fingers onto the trembling line of Kai's arm._

 _'Enough,'_ she murmured, peering closely into Kai's face. ' _You remain me of Lancelot and a little, perhaps of Guinevere, though their blood does not run through your body. The stubborn tilt of your face is the same, through and through.'_ Then her eyes rested upon Excalibur's blade. _'Do not get that thing too bloody and perhaps we will teach you how to let it really shine. There is more to carrying that sword than simply cutting with it.'_

The grass receded from Kai's feet. The castle disappeared from beneath the mist that now rolled over the glitter of the Thames surfacing in front of her in mockery. Kai stared round her at the darkened streets of London once again.

'What?' she yelled out grumpily. 'You're not even going to give me your number?'

There was a giggle and a muted thump and something thin and scratchy bonked Kai on the forehead. Shaking her head in astonished disbelief, Kai unrolled the parchment to see a bunch of runes she couldn't read.

Sighing she yanked out her phone and snapped a photo to send to Gwen…when she got hold of the other girl's number that was. Great. Looked like she would have to make another call to Ben. Wasn't her life hard enough already?

 

\--------------------------

 

Ben pestered her, demanded to know if she was okay. So did her Grandfather. Just as he would pester her again, six days later, by the side of the road back in good old America, as Gwen helped her conjure The Door to Anywhere.

'Take Ben,' he urged. 'Please, if these people are the fey folk they will stoop to anything. You know the legends.'

Kai reached down, felt the smooth glide of Excalibur's hilt against her hand. 'No,' she said, picturing the weird way Ben didn't meet her eyes the last time they were face to face, and the cool sound of Rook's voice, moments before he had hung up on her six days ago. 'Not this time, Grandpa. This is one adventure Ben doesn't get to hog.'

Kai wanted to get back to basics. To herself, the way she had been before she re-met Ben and had to deal with people telling her she had to marry him.

'Fire it up,' she demanded of Gwen, ignoring the light scowl the redhead gave her at the command and the muttered 'you're as bad as Ben,' comment. No, instead she focused on the green that spun up behind the large stone as it creaked open, as Gwen's voice rolled out vowels thoroughly alien to her ears. And Kai had heard a lot of dead languages over the years, had verbalised them to herself as she picked the rotting symbols and letters off the crumbled hunks of stone and clay. Guess this would just be another she would have to pick up.

'Alright, Tinkerbell,' she said firmly, stepping forward. 'Show me the magic. And whatever other relics you have. I'm the archaeologist here, and I'm going to discover them all.'

Beside her, Ester grinned. 'Sure. History trumps magic. Why not?'

Gwen gave them a dead-eyed stare. 'Ben sure can pick 'em,' she said. 'Insulting the fey? That's going to turn out well.'

Kai smiled. Because truthfully? She couldn't wait.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hate this piece, soooo much. Maybe if I dump it out here, I’ll feel better about it.


End file.
